The final design has been ready since the New Year, and production began one week ago. Architonic Concept Space III, designed by Oskar Zieta (Zieta Prozessdesign) and the CAAD faculty at the ETH Zurich will be celebrating its premiere to coincide with the opening of this year’s imm cologne on 19 January. In the second part of our ‘Making of’ report we would like to provide you with a few more insights into the manufacturing process.

Building the final prototype

It has to be modular and adaptable to varying stand sizes, easy to set up and dismantle time and time again, convenient to transport on a single truck etc. – this was the challenging briefing for the Architonic Concept Space. For Zieta it was an ideal opportunity to offer an initial demonstration of the versatility of his FiDU (Freie InnenDruck Umformung) light construction technique in an architectural context. This highly flexible technology, in which precision-cut and welded sheet metal sections are blown up under high pressure to form three-dimensional shapes, could almost have been created specially for this demanding task.

Knot

The result is a modular structure consisting of identical, inflated sheet metal modules. Depending on the stand size they can be placed next to one another, behind one another and even on top of one another. The core of the entire construction is the connecting points which bind the whole structure and distribute the forces involved across the supports and cross members, stabilising it in all directions.